Earning a living as a writer is as likely as winning the lottery. Instead of writing books and persuading others to buy them, find out what people want to write, then do it for themPhilip Pullman: professional writers set to become ‘an endangered species’ due to low wagesI left school with a burning urge to lead the life of a writer: travelling like Byron, feted like Wilde before his fall, creating laughter like Wodehouse and crafting sentences like Nabokov. I had no professional contacts, so I wrote my masterpieces speculatively, and every path I went down ended with a rejection slip or total silence. The perceived wisdom then, as now, was that earning a living as a writer was about as likely as winning a lottery.Then I discovered the secret of marketing: instead of writing things and trying to persuade people to buy them, I would find out what writing services people needed and offer to provide them. So, at the same time as begging publishers and editors for commissions, I made myself available to anyone who might want to write an article or a book but did not feel able to do it for themselves. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2016-01-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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There's a strange concept in marketing that no publicity is really bad. If people talk about you, it broadly raises brand awareness. People eventually forget the bad news but not the brand. Who remembers last year's furor over Apple's onerous publisher subscription terms? That's the eventual... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2012-01-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Apple can improve education and empower authors to create ever-better digital books without limiting customers. Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2012-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Apple’s iPad has fairly quickly become a great tool for the workplace and in education and the company’s latest bid to revolutionize the market is with ebooks. Ebooks themselves are nothing new, but the existence of touchscreen devices such as the iPad means that the opportunities available to... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2012-01-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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At a private event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Thursday, Apple unveiled its multi-pronged approach for cracking the higher education market with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The result is an environment for creating, distributing, and consuming learning materials that... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2012-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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iBooks Author is a free Mac app designed to let authors and publishers easily create multimedia-rich e-textbooks for the iBooks 2 app. Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2012-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Booksellers Association has pledged to write to the chief executives of all 390 local... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The emergence of author podcasts as a viable and entertaining marketing tool is apparent in the success of three such efforts originating from literary Web sites on the West Coast: Brad Listi’s the Nervous Breakdown, Tom Lutz’s Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tyson Cornell’s company Rare Bird... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2012-01-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Random House is diversifying into author management with the launch of an international speakers... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Publisher Tamarind Books has called for more writers and illustrators to tackle multicultural... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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An imprint of Penguin Group USA discovered Kerry Schafer after she posted samples on Bookcountry.com, a site that lets writers share their work. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2012-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, has filed a trademark lawsuit against... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Businesses have little recourse - or human contact - when resolving disputes with Google or Facebook, write Julian Lee and Ben Grubb. Continue reading at The Sydney Morning Herald
[ The Sydney Morning Herald | 2011-12-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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HarperCollins has acquired an account of this year's Libyan conflict by Sky News reporter... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The author Russell Hoban, published by Bloomsbury, died last night at the age of 86. Hoban is... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors including Patrick Ness, Kate Mosse, Simon Singh, Mary Hoffman and Katherine Langrish,... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Foyles has partnered with the National Academy of Writing to host courses for writers seeking to... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Bloomsbury is to offer online services to help unpublished authors learn about the publishing... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Mark Cuban has 335,000 friends on Facebook and 760,000 followers on Twitter. Monday, the Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team will test just how friendly those fans really are. Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-11-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Tue, 15/11/2011 - 10:12 The US Authors Guild has accused Amazon.com of "boldly breaching its contracts" with publishers by signing them up to its new Kindle Lending programme without permission. It claimed it is doing this to drive sales of its Kindle... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-11-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Tom Holman Publication Date: Tue, 08/11/2011 - 15:57 The books industry is not doing enough to attract and train staff to take advantage of the surge in ebook sales, this years Digital Book Census survey from The Bookseller has found. The survey of more than 2,200 people, nearly... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-11-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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